About

What counts as APL

The APL family of programming languages comprehends quite a number of dialects. They can be split into two groups:

Those using the APL character set

These are the ones which stem from Ken Iverson's original attempt, and this group is what this wiki is all about. At the time of writing (2014-02-01) this group consists of APL+Win, APL+Linux and APL+Unix from APL2000, APL2 from IBM, APLX from MicroAPL, GNU APL, Dyalog APL from Dyalog and NARS2000.

Those using just ASCII symbols

This group consists of J, Ken Iversion's second attempt, and the K and Q languages. Note that Q is actually K with keywords.

Note that the concepts of the classical APLs, J and K/Q are so closely related that they all fully qualify as APLs. However, both J and K/Q had their own dedicated wikis before the APL wiki came into existence.

For links providing more information regarding the different dialects see Misc/Vendors.

Who can do what, and why

In order to make a change, or to add new pages, you need an account in order to log in first. Note that after you have logged in you may need to refresh a page in order for the Edit link to appear instead of "Immutable Page". In the early days of the APL Wiki everybody was entitled to make a change, but when the spammers started to insert rubbish into the wiki we had to change the policy.

Everyone who owns an account is welcome to edit the pages on this wiki to correct and improve them, except where pages are marked as immutable. For example, the "FrontPage" of the wiki is immutable. There are some other pages which are immutable as well: TrustedGroup, AutoAdminGroup and BadBoysGroup, for example.

Apart from this most pages are editable by everyone, although there are a few exceptions where pages are "owned" by a particular user.